


run at the past with me

by unrulyangels



Category: Batman (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Crossover, Families of Choice, Gen, Post-Movie: The Old Guard (2020)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25394293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unrulyangels/pseuds/unrulyangels
Summary: "Before Copley--before Copley, Andy’d been terrified of being found out,” Joe says. “She would not have approved of our looking after Jason.”“And children always made Booker melancholy,” Nicky says, his mouth bent in a frown.
Relationships: Jason Todd & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova & Nile Freeman, Nile Freeman & Jason Todd
Comments: 56
Kudos: 412





	run at the past with me

**Author's Note:**

> Me: [watching _The Old Guard_ , absolutely loving it]  
> Also me: "Wait--you know what'd make this movie even cooler?"
> 
> (Title from Tegan and Sara's "I Won't Be Left.")

The week after they leave Booker in Wapping, Copley sends the rest of them to Phagwara.

(“There’s this group of Jain schoolgirls,” he’d said, at their new headquarters back in Surrey. “Mostly seven- and eight-year-olds, but--”

Joe had started guffawing somewhere between “schoolgirls” and “eight-year-olds,” cutting him off mid-sentence. Nile had not known what to make of his reaction, or of Andy’s, who’d just narrowed her eyes at Copley and tapped at the handle of her axe.)

Nicky grumbles, good-naturedly, about criminals never drawing contingency plans for immortal warriors when they arrive at the site, but Nile is glad when the men holding the girls--nineteen of them in total, with only seven guns between them--start falling like dominos, one after the other. This is not about the men, for her. 

This has never been about any men for Nile--not in Phagwara, or Chicago, or Kabul--only those they try to hold back or hold down.

  
#

  
“Where to next?” Andy asks, once they’ve taken all of the girls back to their parents, pressing at a bruise on her jaw. “Kashmir?”

Copley hums in assent, his voice a wasp in all of their ears, and Nile shrugs, wiping at the blood on her chin with a rag, but Joe and Nicky just look at each-other and then at Andy and Nile--apologetically, the second time.

“We were thinking,” Nicky says, his voice hesitant, “about spending a day or two in Pakistan. We have not been in a while, you know.”

Andy flaps one of her hands near her forehead, fanning herself. “The two of you want to play at being tourists in Pakistan now, in the middle of July?”

Nicky blinks. “We’re near the border,” he says, gesturing to his left in a vague sort of way.

“It’s Eid, also,” Joe adds, “and no one does mutton karahi like they do mutton karahi.”

Andy rolls her eyes as Joe and Nicky high-five one-another. “Fine,” she says, sighing, “but take Nile with you. I have some business to take care of in Shimla, anyway.”

“Business?” Copley asks, in their ears.

“Business,” Joe confirms, grinning, as Andy winks at him.

  
#

  
They cross the border into Lahore the next day, the three of them, after watching the flag-lowering ceremony at Wagah.

“Is that what the two of you were like, back in Jerusalem?” Nile asks, later, as they’re having lunch by the Badshahi Mosque. “Puffing your chests up at each-other, roaring?”

Joe shakes his head.

Nicky considers. “There was more stabbing,” he says, offering Joe a fond smile and Nile the basket of garlic naan. “There was a lot more stabbing.”

Nile thanks him, and takes a piece of naan from the basket, but she does not eat it; only places it on her plate and stares at it. She’d taken her mother and brother to Rangoli the day before she’d left Chicago, she remembers--and now she won’t see either of them ever again. Now they’re mourning her, the way she mourns her father (and also not in that way at all).

  
#

  
“This blogger, Allison Wanderland, says that there’s nothing to do or see in Islamabad,” Nile says, squinting at her phone as they drive along the motorway. “Allison Wanderland says that Karachi is the place to be, or Lahore.”

“Allison Wanderland does not know what she is talking about,” Nicky says mildly, turning to look at Nile in the back-seat.

“We have a house in Islamabad,” Joe says at the same time as Nicky, as though offended.

“Do you have bases in every country, then?” Nile asks, staring at the mist-covered mountains outside her window. (Before Andy’d kidnapped her, Nile had only ever been two places; Afghanistan and Illinois. When she thinks too hard about all of the places that Andy and Joe and Booker and Nicky have been, she gets light-headed, dizzy.)

“Not every country, no,” Nicky says.

“Why Pakistan, then?” The person that Nile had been a month ago had wanted, sometimes, to flee to Wellington or London or Vancouver; had wanted, sometimes, to get as far away from Afghanistan and its heartaches as possible.

“This family that we helped during Partition, they built us a villa in thanks some years later,” Joe answers, “and a great-granddaughter of theirs still keeps an eye on it for us.”

“Also, the people here are nice to outsiders,” Nicky adds, “and it is normal for men to walk around holding hands. It is not normal everywhere.” He rubs at the sides of his face. “Sometimes, you just want to exist in the world in a way that is easy, you know?”

“I know,” Nile says, shutting her eyes and pressing her forehead to the cool glass of the window. “I know.”

  
#

  
The house, Joe and Nicky’s house, is nicer than Nile’d expected after the hideouts in Phagwara and Goussainville and Val d’Argent; it’s all tall windows and walnut-coloured floors and walls stippled with starlight and canvases. It’s like a house that someone born in this century’d want to live in, she thinks, her lips quirked as she inspects a row of frames on a side-table by the stairs. Here is Joe in a loose robe in front of the Ka’bah. Here is Nicky in Spain, leaning against the walls of an albergue, his eyes closed and mouth crooked in a smile. Here is Andy and Joe in Argentina. Here is Booker and Nicky in South Africa. Here is all four of them in Cairo and Amsterdam and Kyoto and Bangkok and Sydney.

Here is a boy barrelling into Joe’s arms like a bullet, his fingers catching in the belt loops of Joe’s jeans. (“Bee, habibi,” Joe murmurs into the boy’s thick black hair. “We’ve missed you, too.”)

  
#

  
“Who is Bee?” Nile asks, later, when the four of them are in the kitchen, Joe reading the boy stories from an illustrated edition of _The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments_ and Nicky frying them sausages for chili dogs, of all things. “What is he to you?”

“He’s--ours,” Nicky says, and Nile knows that he can’t be--not in the way that she’s imagining, at least--but she considers the boy’s dark hair, the way it twists like Joe’s, and his eyes, a pale colour like Nicky’s, all the same.

“We found him wandering around Gotham last year, pale as a ghost but covered in blood, as though it’d decided to rush right out of him,” Joe says. (Bee flinches at the city’s name, but Nile only half-registers the movement, distracted herself. When were Joe and Nicky in Gotham? Why were they there? You don’t enter that Jersey city, with its madmen and its mobsters and its sewers stuffed with crocodiles, unless you have a death-wish; everyone knows that. Then it hits her. Right.) “We took him to a hospital, but no one ever came for him, and when they discharged him back onto the streets, we took him to Bermuda with us, then to Mauritania, then brought him here.”

“It’s good for him, to not be so close to Gotham,” Nicky says, reaching out to ruffle Bee’s glossy hair.

“It’s good for everyone,” Nile agrees. “But why take him with you? Why not take him to DCF?”

Nicky turns to look at her, a complicated expression on his face. “Bee is like us,” he says.

Nile stares at him, and then at Bee; if the boy notices, he does not say anything--but then he has not said anything all night. “I haven’t dreamt about him,” she says. “Not the way I’ve dreamt about Quynh.”

“He is not one of us,” Nicky clarifies, “but he is not unlike us. He has autopsy scars on his chest, Nile. Bee might not survive a bullet to the heart or a knife to the lungs now, but he survived something terrible once.”

Nile swallows the urge to vomit. This boy with autopsy scars on his chest and pale scratches on his face and fingers and forearms, he is younger than her brother. “Do the others know about him?” she manages.

Joe and Nicky glance at one-another over Bee’s head. “Before Copley--before Copley, Andy’d been terrified of being found out,” Joe says. “She would not have approved of our looking after Bee.”

“And children always made Booker melancholy,” Nicky says, his mouth bent in a frown.

“Does Bee speak?” Nile asks, hastily changing the subject as Booker’s specter stalks into the kitchen.

“Not often,” Joe says. “He’d been howling and keening back in Gotham, but incoherently, like a banshee. We could not understand him and half-thought we’d adopted a spirit, but he is better now--calmer. More person than specter.”

Nile watches Bee watch her, his stare vacant, but almost willfully so. Yes, there is someone in there, she thinks; he’s hiding himself the way that some of the kids in Chicago learned to hide themselves, but he is there.

“How’d you learn his name?” she asks, turning toward the others.

“It is the one thing that we understood,” Joe says, as Nicky cards his fingers through their kid’s hair, “back when he was still--unsettled. Delirious, frantic. He’d say it over and over again, like a prayer: Bee, Bee. Bee.”

  
#

  
Andy texts the three of them after dinner: _Copley wants us in Albany tomorrow. Family of cannibals, if you can believe it. Flight from ISB at 5:30, sorry. Four tickets attached._

F-U-C-K, Joe spells on the Scrabble board that Bee’d unearthed from a cupboard. “She knows about the kid?”

 _I know about the kid_ , Andy confirms, as though she is somehow in the room with the rest of them. (She could be, Nile thinks. Andy’s a superhero, after all.) _The two of you weren’t exactly subtle, buying him stuffed animals everywhere we went_.

 _Some of them were for Joe_ , Nicky writes.

Nile laughs as Joe rolls his eyes at Nicky--one thousand years, she thinks--and tells Bee that they’ll have to finish their game on the plane tomorrow.

“We’re flying to JFK International tomorrow, the four of us,” Nile says, when Bee seems to furrow his brow at her.

She watches as he uses Scrabble letters to spell out the word G-O-O-D in front of her.

  
#

  
Later, as she climbs into bed, she wonders if she’s not seen Bee somewhere before. There is something--strangely familiar, Nile thinks, about the lines of his face. But she would remember meeting him, and she’d enjoyed being alive too much to have ever set foot inside of Gotham, before.

Jay’s sister had once sent her a copy of _GQ_ in a care package, Nile remembers vaguely. Dick Grayson had been on the cover. There’d been large photographs of him and his family inside the magazine, too. He’s from Gotham, isn’t he? Nile thinks, yawning, but she falls asleep before she can--actually, properly--attend to the thought.

**Author's Note:**

> ♡


End file.
